My only experience with HP was with a Pavillion which suffered the overheating problem and fried the cpu (AMD). Not my problem but I got to fix it. I'm partial to 4 or 5 year old Dell Latitudes , business computers turned in at the end of lease etc, they flood the market and the price drops ...T
Go with the Acer. The HP is way too old! You can install windows 7 on the acer, but you need to add usb3.0 drivers to the installer, disable UEFI boot and only install updates with simplix update pack, because windows update will tell you that you have an unsupported CPU. With windows 8, you need to patch the latest updates or else windows update will also fail. Everything should work without any problem
And parts for those Dells are really cheap (on ebay...ect.) if you need to replace anything in the future
Presently using an E5430 with an i5-3210m processor cpu benchmark 3817 which cost me $66 (advertised "overheating problem" ) doesn't overheat for me replacement motherboard $17 if I need it The HP uses an i3-6006u cpu benchmark 3101 The acer an i5-8250u cpu benchmark 7641 Now the E5430 will accept a processor upgrade to an I7-3610qm cpu benchmark 7471 this cost $90 and I have one running in another E5430 , with a 1Tb Firecuda hybrid hdd and a 1600x900 screen it works great ...T
that's really excellent price for motherboard replacement, i never had or worked on any Dell machine before so i don't know much about that brand, all i know is what i've been told by Dell users which is they never had or very rarely any problems using this brand since the first use.
Thank you everyone for participating in the thread. Now that my HDD is near imminent failure, I'm on my cell so please pardon me for not quoting everyone individually. Please bear with me. It's not the updates that I worry about so much, it's the drivers. In fact my current 8.1 was last updated in 2016 and I have no further plans to update it unless a feature pack comes along. That being said, I checked the drivers for both the models and neither HP nor Acer are availing drivers for 8.1 Why in the world do they believe that everyone is using Win 10 only ? Now the question is will Win 10 drivers work on 8.1 Is there any way to be sure ? While the Acer has tempting configuration superiority over HP, I'm not so sure about it's build quality. I can live with a lesser configuration but I want durability the most thus I'm a bit hesitant about Acer. I'll also look into Dell to see if there's anything that fits the bill. I'll report back. Thanks again everyone.
it's not a matter of believe or not believe, Microsoft wants to make sure that everyone switches to win10 as soon as possible so they can spy on people as much as possible.
Absolutely spot on but why do these hardware manufacturers comply with Microsoft's wishes? Its their hardware and providing drivers is in my opinion their responsibility. I wish I was in EU, I would have taken the fight to the court of law. Anyways on the topic I found a Dell that has exact same specifications as HP with a marginal difference in price. Does the Dells have better build quality in comparison to HP? And what about the heating issue? If anyone's running a Dell, please your insight will be highly appreciated.
Overheating used to be an issue about 5 yr ago with HP and Dell running the Nvidia gpu with ball gate array you can google the issue problem was the cpu and gpu would get so hot (gamers etc) that the solder holding the chips down would melt and some connections would be lost, blank screens, lines across screen complete failure the fix was to reflow the board (google that also) The most humorous fix was to wrap the board in insulation , except for the cpu and gpu and heat it in the kitchen oven to the melting point of solder whereupon the solder would reflow and repair the connections believe it or not (you can google that too) ...T
The problem with the reflow is that it's not a permanent solution, it's only temporary as it lasts to maximum 6 months, i personally have faced this problem on HP pavilion few years back, the GPU failed and i couldn't replace it as it was integrated into the board so i used the reflow procedure to fix this issue, it worked for only 7 months and the problem occured again.
I am a huge fan of HP business PCs but their consumer crap has been exactly that, crap. I have had pretty good luck with Acer hardware so far.
I've had a ton of HPs over the years and with the exception of one from the DV9000 series (the ones that had all the lawsuits, etc.) they were all good. I've had a couple Dell computers as well and they were money pits. Two XPS desktops that I just kept putting money into because the power supply would go out, some card would go out, etc. The one clunker from HP (dv9074cl), was out of warranty when the MoBo fried and apparently had missed the recall, HP still fixed it for me after some back and forth (they looked me up and saw I've owned like a jillion HP products) and it still runs to this day with Windows 10 installed. It's just slooooow. I'm currently buying a new laptop and although the latest Inspiron 2 in 1s look pretty freakin' sharp in person, I'm sure I'll ultimately choose an HP Envy X360. I went to the store the other day to take a gander at what is out right now and Acer, Asus and Lenovo looked like I'd break them in a week. Not to mention, the limited future upgrade options on their lines. This soldered for a few mm thinner crap needs to stop as well as the lets only put one RAM slot in with 16gb max. Ugh.
Upgrade options on most laptops are always limited, They do not even put doors on the bottom for the memory, hard drives and some have their batteries buried in the back and un-accessible too. Any changes on those newer ones will require splitting it apart to get the bottom off. I can recall that HP's used to be the biggest pia's to get the bottom off
I actually prefer both brands and it depends on what you are looking for . Acer seems to be better with budget laptops than HP. When it comes to the high-end laptops HP trumps Acer. That is just my simple point about them though.